OFFICE OF THE CHAIRPERSON

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

20 April 2008

The movement represented by the Dalai Lama is utterly reactionary.
It is for the restoration of a despotic and extremely exploitative
theocracy in Tibet. Worse, it is an instrument of US imperialism in
its dual policy of containment and engagement against China and the
Chinese people. It is condemnable.

The repressive and bloodsucking theocracy represented by the Dalai
Lama has long been overthrown by the Tibetan people themselves,
causing his flight from Tibet together with his ultra-reactionary
retinue. Since then, these relics of the past have been used as anti-
China lackeys of US imperialism in the Cold War and thereafter. They
have been financed by the Central Intelligence Agency and other
insidious state agencies of the US as well as by certain
nongovernmental organizations and funding agencies of monopoly
capitalist groups.

Some progressives have argued that the level of oppression,
exploitation and discrimination against the Tibetan people has risen
because of the growth of capitalism in China and that therefore the
Tibetan people are justified to assert and exercise the right to
national self-determination up to the right to secede. But the main
contradiction to deal with first of all on the issue of Tibet is
between the Chinese people of various nationalities, including the
Tibetans, who uphold China’s national sovereignty and the Dalai
Lama’s pro-imperialist reactionary movement which demands the
restoration of a backward social system far more reactionary and
brutal than capitalism.

That the Tibet Autonomous Region belongs to China is a longstanding
fact in previous centuries and in the recent decades of the People’s
Republic of China. The Chinese people of various nationalities,
including the Tibetans, concur on this fact. Even the Dalai Lama
makes public protestations that he is not demanding the separation of
Tibet from China.

But he and his ultra-reactionary kind and their imperialist handlers
raise claims about “ethnic genocide” and “human rights violations”
against China precisely to support the maximum objective of seeking
the separation of Tibet from China and the intervention of
imperialist powers and the minimum objective of discrediting and
cutting down China to serve the purposes of the imperialist powers on
time for the Olympic Games.

The multi-media owned and controlled by the imperialist powers play
up and drum up the smallest protest pickets of the followers of the
Dalai Lama in various capitals of the world and the hypocritical
statements of Bush, Brown and other imperialist leaders about human
rights. They do so to an extent far beyond the media coverage given
to the continuing mass actions of the people against the war of
aggression in Iraq and to the massive violation of international law
and human rights by the imperialist powers and their puppets in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Turkey, India, Tamil Eelam, the
Philippines, and elsewhere in the world.

The most interesting development in the Himalayas today is not the
protest actions in support of the reactionary movement represented
and headed by the Dalai Lama. It is the unprecedented resounding
victory of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in the elections for
Constituent Assembly. This spells the abolition of the monarchy and
establishment of the democratic federal republic and opens further
the way to basic democratic reforms towards the completion of the new
democratic revolution. But the multi-media of the imperialist powers
play up the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan reactionaries and play down
the progressive political victory of CPN (Maoist) and the Nepali
people.